Published by By sjhowardPublished on 20 February 2006.Less than a minute long.

Hold up! Before you read on, please read this...

This post was published more than 13 years ago

I keep old posts on the site because I often enjoy reading old content on other people's sites. It can be interesting to see how views have changed over time: for example, how my strident teenage views have, to put it mildly, mellowed.

I'm not a believer in brushing the past under the carpet. I've written some offensive rubbish on here in the past: deleting it and pretending it never happened doesn't change that. I hope that stumbling across something that's 13 years old won't offend anyone anew, because I hope that people can understand that what I thought and felt and wrote about then is probably very different to what I think and feel and wrote about now. It's a relic of an (albeit recent) bygone era.

So, given the age of this post, please bear in mind:

My views may well have changed in the last 13 years. I have written some very silly things over the years, many of which I find utterly cringeworthy today.

This post might use words or language in ways which I would now consider highly inappropriate, offensive, embarrassing, or all three.

Council Tax is rising by a predictable amount – probably as low as it could possibly ever rise by, given that it primarily funds people’s salaries. But if one more person goes on TV claiming it’s a stealth tax, I think I’ll scream. It’s by far the most publicised and debated tax we pay. It’s forever in the media. It’s about as stealthy as taking your pet elephant round Tesco, having previously taken it to get its hair dyed orange. It’s not in anyway stealthy. So to call it a stealth tax is positively ludicrous.

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